


Inescapable

by LtLJ



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-01
Updated: 2007-05-01
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:02:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LtLJ/pseuds/LtLJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lorne's team, with the help of some Athosian traders, rescue Atlantis from Lucius Lavin. But they can't find John anywhere. This is an AU, an alternate ending to episode 3.3, Irresistible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inescapable

The first thing Evan Lorne saw when he stepped through the stargate was Lucius Lavin, smiling in welcome. So he shot him in the face with a Wraith stunner.

Sheppard's instructions had been pretty specific on that point.

The gateroom went nuts, but Evan had been expecting that. Benson, who could have had a career as a pro quarterback, cut to the left and lobbed a gas grenade at Ronon and the gate security team. Evan's team were all wearing breathing units from the Alpha Site, where they were stored for occasions just such as this. While the others pitched more gas grenades, Ramirez stunned Chuck, Teyla, Dr. Weir, and five other people on the control gallery, making sure nobody was close enough to hit the emergency control for the gate shield. Then Evan clicked his headset. Halling jumped through the gate followed by a dozen Athosians, all armed with more Wraith stunners.

When the gateroom was secure and they were practically standing in a pile of the unconscious bodies of their friends and colleagues, Halling commented, "That was much easier than I had expected."

"Yeah." Evan nodded. Granted, they had taken them by surprise, but the security team and even Ronon had been unprepared and almost laughably slow. Evan felt damn cold thinking of what could have happened had the city been hit by a real enemy. Evan tapped his head significantly. "Sheppard was right, the drug makes them stupid."

Halling looked around, his expression wry. "He was certainly not exaggerating."

Evan and his team had been at the Alpha site, surveying the planet, when the gate had dialed up and the base's comm system had received a transmission burst from Atlantis. It was a recorded message from Sheppard, detailing what had happened and including all the data on Lavin's drug that McKay had come up with before he had been infected. The only reason Sheppard had escaped so far was that he had a cold, but he knew that wouldn't protect him for too much longer. Beckett had been able to come up with a formula for an antidote that he had successfully tested on himself, but he had been caught and re-infected, and Sheppard was running out of options, so he was going to try to get control of the gate console long enough to send the message. He had also included the address of the planet where Halling and a group of Athosians were on an extended trading trip, so Lorne could warn them and get their help.

The drug, chemical, whatever it was, made everybody slow and goofy, so taking them out wasn't that hard. "They're like smiling zombies, Major," Ramirez commented on the headset. "It's really creepy." Once they secured the gate room and swept the upper floors of the tower, they took medical, so Parrish and the Athosian medic -- who was actually a midwife, but she knew the infirmary pretty well -- could search for the antidote Beckett had made. That underway, Evan went down to the brig to spring Sheppard. He knew the Colonel must be locked up down there. Whether he had managed to trick them or hold them off long enough for him to use the console, they would have figured it out when the gate dialed the Alpha site. That's why Evan had decided to play dumb, pretend he hadn't received the message, and wait until their scheduled return time to launch the assault.

But Sheppard wasn't in the main holding cell. "Okay, fine," Evan told Benson, getting out his life signs detector. "They put him somewhere else."

Benson nodded wryly. "He's probably really pissed."

Evan snorted. "I sure as hell would be." He frowned at the detector's screen. "I'm not seeing any life signs in this area."

He and Benson searched the entire level, but found nothing. Evan was getting a little worried. The city was pretty damn big, and if Sheppard was locked up somewhere else...

"Did you check the puddlejumper bay?" Parrish said over the headset. "We know he was in the gateroom to send the message burst, if they weren't able to catch him and he escaped the city--"

"No, we didn't, because I'm an idiot," Evan said, and Benson grinned in relief. Obviously, Sheppard had managed to escape in a jumper and was just out of radio range somewhere.

But when one of the Athosians guarding the gateroom went up to check, none of the jumpers were missing.

By this point Althea the midwife had found the antidote hidden in Beckett's tea caddy, and she had given it to Beckett and Dr. Keller. Now they just had to wait for them to recover from the stun so they could start mass-producing the stuff.

Evan used the all-city comm to try to contact Sheppard, but there was no response. He called Ramirez, Halling, and half the Athosians back from their positions, and they searched the entire operations tower, the living quarters, then the labs and storage areas.

Everybody was beginning to look worried. While the others were checking the last corridor of the lab section, Halling caught up with Evan in the transporter foyer and said what they were all starting to think. "Surely they would not have... They could not have been so lost to reason."

Evan just shook his head. He was beginning to feel a little sick, because their people had been drugged stupid, and willing to die to obey Lavin's every whim, and that was a bad fricking combination. He tapped his headset and said, "Anybody know how to use the city's internal sensor console?" It didn't work in the areas that had taken extensive water damage, but at least it would let them scan the powered sections.

"I can, sir," Ramirez replied. "I used to help Dr. Grodin sometimes when we were short-handed, and he showed me the basics."

Evan nodded. "Get to it." They needed to move fast, in case Sheppard had been trapped somewhere dangerous, or without access to food or water, or if he was hurt. Evan didn't want to have to wait until the others woke up coherent enough to explain what they had done with him.

Except they didn't find Sheppard with the sensors. And when the others started to wake, no one remembered where he was.

No one.

  
**Five Days Earlier**

  
John spent the first night in exile huddled in a hollow tree. At daylight the next morning, he rolled out, stiff as a corpse. He had been sneezing and coughing all night, and now his head felt like it was stuffed with rags. Snotty rags. He limped around the little forest clearing making old man noises, until his sore muscles loosened up enough for him to walk. Then he started up through the trees to the top of the rocky hill.

For gear, he had his pants, t-shirt, boots, his watch and wristband. Plus bruises and a sore jaw from the fight when they had taken his jacket and emptied his pockets. And a sore shoulder and an aching knee from landing badly when they had thrown him out of the jumper. _At least they could have landed the damn thing first,_ he thought, wincing.

The planet, of course, had an orbital gate. He supposed he was lucky they hadn't just tossed him through from the gateroom, but this way Lucius could tell himself that it wasn't murder, just abandonment. Murder-lite.

Once John reached the crest of the hill, he spotted the village down in the valley. It was a couple of concentric circles of conical stone huts with thatched roofs, flanked by green fields leading across a flat plain to the silver band of a winding river.

"Crap," John muttered.

Even from a distance he knew what he would find there. The fields were overgrown with tall grass and the racks of wooden pipes that must have carried irrigation water from the river had collapsed. In the village itself, the paths and open spaces between the houses were green with weeds and there was no smoke coming from the chimneys.

When he got down there, he found a collection of little one or two room stone houses with half-collapsed roofs, overgrown gardens, and desiccated corpses. A lot of desiccated corpses. It hadn't been culled that long ago, maybe a few months. Most of them had died holding weapons, now broken, clubs, bows, long edged weapons that looked like pikes. These people had tried to fight.

He made a fruitless and depressing search for survivors, picking his way through the debris in each little house. He didn't find any evidence that anyone had been living here, and no sign that survivors had salvaged any belongings, or tried to bury the bodies.

When he walked into the building that had been some kind of schoolhouse/nursery, he came out again and stood facing the open plain and the river, swallowing down bile until he could push the image out of his head. _That was stupid, John,_ he thought. _You should have been expecting that._

It was time to get out of here.

The village would be a Wraith-magnet, and he was also worried about the possibility that Lucius would send the team back to either screw with him some more or kill him. He couldn't avoid the jumper's life-sign detector, but it would be a lot harder for them to track him down in the heavily forested hills.

After a moment, he went back to the house that had the fewest corpses. He found a big woven sack he could sling across his back, and filled it with heavy felt blankets, a set of flints, a hand ax, a coil of rope, a couple of hunting knives, a cooking pot and a leather waterskin. He also found a hooded jacket hanging on a peg, made of layers of blue and gray fabric. He hated to take it, because he suspected the person who had last worn it was lying outside, but he knew he would need it for the cold nights. He was careful to leave everything as undisturbed as possible, to leave little trace that he had been here. If the Wraith had had such a hard-on about this place that they had wiped it out, there was a good chance they would come back periodically to check if it had been re-inhabited. That was a pattern they had followed on other worlds.

Outside he poked through the gardens, finding something that looked like toba root, something else that looked like blue turnips. He collected a bag full, hoping they were actually vegetables and not poisonous ornamental plants.

On the way out he picked up an unbroken pike.

Up in the heavily forested hills, he found a clearing where a stream trickled down a rocky face, then widened out into a series of shallow basins in wide steps of flat stone. Following the rock back around the top of the hill, back into the shelter of the trees, he found a shelf of stone that formed a shallow cave. The inside was dry and bare, with good drainage. And he couldn't see the dead village from here.

He collected some wood, got a fire going, and started boiling a pot of water to drink. With the blankets made into a pallet and his supplies neatly stored, and a screen of brush woven for concealment and to block the wind at night, it made a pretty nice camp. "Home sweet home," John said to the world in general. "Now all I have to do is mark the days until somebody rescues me, or Lucius sends them back to kill me, or I go crazy and hang myself. Whichever comes first."

Then he sneezed.

  
***

  
The next couple of days were boring and depressing. At some point, probably on that first freezing night, John's cold had gotten exponentially worse, but he did most of his coughing, hacking, and sneezing in the cold damp of the evening. It cleared up enough by midmorning that he could go out and explore the forested hills without startling large flocks of birds into flight and betraying his position to any top level predators that might be lurking. He didn't want to push it, because he felt pretty weak by the end of the day. And it was becoming more and more apparent that he wasn't going to stumble on a family of friendly survivors who wanted to hang out with him.

He was sleeping pretty good, drinking a lot of boiled water from the pond, and forcing himself to keep eating, even though these were the blandest root vegetables in two galaxies, so he kept hoping his cold would go away. But his skin felt too warm and oversensitive and scratchy against his clothes, and it was worse in the late afternoon, so he knew he had a low grade fever. If he had known his people were about to turn on him and abandon him on an uninhabited planet, he would have hidden Tylenol and some decongestant packets in his boots. _Nice to have 20-20 hindsight,_ he thought, putting his pot on the fire and sitting down to peel turnip-things for breakfast.

He wasn't sure the transmission had finished sending before Ronon had stunned him. In two more days, give or take some hours for the difference in this planet's rotation and Atlantica's, it would be past the point where Lorne's team and Halling's traders would have returned to Atlantis. Either armed with John's warning, or, you know, not. Even if they hadn't gotten the warning, that was still two chances for somebody to take Lucius out and recover Atlantis. If Lucius took out both Lorne and Halling-- John nicked his thumb with his peeling knife and winced and cursed. He would be looking at two months before the _Daedalus_ showed up.

So in two days, he would need to start fishing or hunting.

It was the next day when he made the big mistake.

He felt like crap, so he wanted to go back to the village and collect more toba root and turnip-things, enough to last a while so he could stay in and maybe finally shake this cold. The sky was a little overcast to the north, but by the time he finished filling his bag the clouds had moved in, covering the whole valley. It started to drizzle and he should have taken shelter in the nearest house and waited it out. But he hated the sight of this place, where people had raised their crops and their children and in their spare time painted flowers on little bowls and embroidered wall hangings, and fought and died as cattle and playthings for alien abominations. He thought he could at least make it to the shelter of the forest before the rain started in earnest.

But that estimate had been based on his sprinting ability before the cold from hell, and he ended up staggering to a halt, winded far too soon. He got soaking wet before he reached the trees.

  
***

  
John woke the next morning gasping for breath. He rolled over, coughing, hunched against the ache in his chest.

It was just too fucking cold in this cave, and his clothes were still damp, and he didn't have any dry wood. He crawled out and managed to stand. _Oh yeah, this isn't good._ His skin felt dry and burning hot, he was dizzy, his whole body hurt. He staggered over to the pond.

He hadn't realized it was this late in the day. It was nearly noon, and the sun was bright on the water and on the smooth stone at the edge of the basin. John sat down, barely holding himself upright on wobbly arms.

The stone was warm on his bare feet, the sun soaking through his damp clothes and soothing his aching lungs. He was still breathing in gasps, but the warmth made it easier. He just sat there, watching the little brine shrimp-things scuttle around the bottom of the pond's basin, and the delicate stick insects that skated along the top of the water. He couldn't hear the birds, but then his ears were so stuffed up he couldn't hear himself, either.

John had always gotten through life by trying to look on the bright side. On the one hand you had career ruin and personal disaster; on the other hand you had the harsh beauty and isolation of Antarctica. On the one hand you had life-sucking alien vampires and responsibility for the safety of a couple hundred assorted terrified civilians, worried Marines, and the entire surviving population of Athos; on the other hand you had real spaceships, an incredibly beautiful city with 360 degrees of oceanfront view, an expedition leader who didn't write you off when you had a disagreement, and friends. On the one hand you turned your back for two seconds and had your city taken over by a mind-controlling nutjob with the morals of a badly raised two-year-old who got your own people to abandon you to a lingering lonely death without a backward glance; on the other hand... Okay, he didn't have another hand for that one. Except that he had the feeling that he wasn't going to have to worry about going crazy and talking to the village corpses or being eaten by an alien mountain lion or the Wraith coming back for seconds.

But there was no point in just sitting here. There might not be any point in doing anything else, but there was even less point in just sitting here. Or something. Whatever, the thought of food, even tasteless food, made him nauseous, but hot water would be nice. He shoved himself up and went back to the cave.

  
***

  
Rodney staggered out of the operations gallery transporter with a coldpack pressed to his head and the urge to commit homicide. Unfortunately, the person he wanted to kill most was himself. Actually, no the second person he wanted to kill most was himself. To get a shot at Lucius he was going to have to stand in a long line.

Taking long strides, Ronon caught up with Rodney in the foyer, following him around the corner to the gallery. "Any word?" Ronon demanded.

"No, dammit. Beckett just managed to slap me awake fifteen minutes ago." This was a nightmare. Teams were searching the powerless sections of the city, but so far there was so sign of Sheppard. "Did somebody ask Lucius yet? That bastard--"

Ronon shook his head. "Can't. Lorne shot him in the face."

"Really?" Rodney jolted to a halt, startled.

"With a stunner," Ronon corrected. "He can't talk yet."

"Oh." Rodney rolled his eyes and started walking again. "Pity."

Ronon shook his head in frustration. "If Sheppard's not in the city--"

"Then we sent him through the gate," Rodney finished, his throat tight. Lucius had read their reports, Rodney knew that much. Lucius would have known just where to send Sheppard, what would do him the most damage. "Just hope we didn't send him to the Genii. Or the Wraith."

"We wouldn't have--" Ronon bit off the rest, looking away with a snarl of angry despair.

Rodney grimaced. The problem was, they could have done anything.

On the gallery, Elizabeth was on her headset, her expression furious. Teyla was pacing, looking frazzled, running a hand through her hair. Chuck looked up from the console as Rodney reached him, his face creased in frustration. "There's some kind of block on the dialing history for the DHD, I can't--"

"Yes, yes, I know!" Rodney shoved Chuck out of the way and bent over the console, typing frantically. Somebody pushed a chair under him and he sat down. The system logged every gate activation, incoming or outgoing, and every time a jumper left its rack. Beckett had given Rodney a hasty pr?is of the situation, and they knew there had been an activation when Sheppard had managed to send a message to Lorne at the Alpha site, and another when Lorne and Halling had gated back in, but the entire log was a coded scrambled mess.

"Do we know who destroyed the logs?" Teyla asked, sounding like she was barely holding on to her temper. "Was it Lucius?"

"No," Rodney said through gritted teeth. "It was me." Rodney remembered Lucius asking him -- ordering him -- to scramble the logs, but he didn't remember why, or what had happened before that. He didn't remember what they had done with Sheppard.

Nobody did.

Teyla clapped a hand over her eyes, snarling in frustration. Ronon folded his arms tightly, jaw set, as if trying to compress his long body into one tense bundle.

Rodney just couldn't believe this was happening. "He could still be somewhere in the city. They haven't searched the whole--"

"Dr. Weir, here it is."

Rodney glanced up, then did a double-take. Lorne was walking up the gallery, holding a black leather flight jacket. "Is that--"

"It is Colonel Sheppard's," Teyla confirmed, her expression grim. "Ramirez found it in Jumper Three."

Elizabeth took the jacket, her jaw tight, her face set with the expression she got when she was trying not to show despair. "Ramirez said there were some other things? John's pocket knife, his headset--"

"Yes, ma'am." Lorne winced and added, "There's blood on the collar."

"God," Rodney muttered, feeling a sick sensation settle in his stomach. He turned back to the console.

It took him ten long minutes to break his own code, but finally Rodney got the damn log entries to display. He blurted, "There was an address dialed six hours after the dial-out for the message burst to Lorne's team. PX--" Rodney froze, swallowed the sudden sick lump in his throat. The system was displaying a database entry for the address, and he knew what the Ancient warning symbols meant. "That's an orbital gate."

The gallery was dead silent. Rodney looked up to see Elizabeth's already pale face go white. She said, quietly, "Check it out."

  
***

  
When the jumper passed through the gate into space, Rodney looked away from the viewport, fixing his eyes on the laptop's screen. Data scrolled, collected from the jumper's interface. Nobody breathed. Rodney studied the screen, widened the search, then widened it again. He felt the lump in his throat ease just a little. His voice thick, he said, "It's clear, there's no..." Even accounting for a few days of drift, the jumper's scan was showing no evidence that a human body was floating in space near the gate. "There's nothing."

There was a joint exhalation of relief. Teyla buried her face in her hands. Halling reached over and squeezed her shoulder. Ronon shoved away from the cockpit hatch and walked into the back cabin. Lorne muttered, "So far, so good." He tapped the communications relay, said, "Jumper One to base, we're clear. We're about to make our descent and start a scan of the planet."

Elizabeth, the relief obvious in her voice even over the comm, said, "Thank you, Major. Good luck."

  
***

  
John was sitting in front of his cave, fumbling to start a fire of damp wood with damp tinder and damp flints. At least it was distracting him from his pounding head and aching lungs. Then Rodney burst out of the bushes and yelled, "Where the hell have you been? We've been looking everywhere!"

John stared, bleary and confused. It was obviously a hallucination. And he hadn't realized until right this moment just how pissed off he was. Hell, even hallucinatory Rodney couldn't be bothered to apologize. John shoved to his feet, and yelled, "You threw me out of the jumper, you bastards, and you didn't even bother to land first!" and threw a stick at him.

Rodney jerked back in outrage, even though it was a really small stick. "Hey! Dammit, you could at least be grateful that we--"

Okay, that was it. "Get the fuck away from me," John snarled, and leaned down to grab for a rock.

That turned out to be a bad idea, because leaning over wrecked John's tenuous grasp on balance and he sat down hard. But hallucinatory Rodney had already stomped off into the bushes again by that point.

John hunched over, nearly coughing up a lung, then realized he could dimly hear crashing in the brush nearby. Which meant it was loud and close, since his ears were so stuffed up. _Oh, crap._ He eased back under the rock into the cave, stretching to reach for his bigger hunting knife.

Then John saw two sets of legs, one dressed in familiar BDUs and the other in Athosians leathers. Lorne leaned down under the shelf of rock and said, "Colonel? We got your message, the city's secure. It just took us a while to find you."

John stared blankly. It had to be the lack of oxygen. "I'm hallucinating?"

Halling ducked in, saying, "We have been very worried about you, Colonel Sheppard." He caught John by the scruff of his ragged coat, and neatly extracted him from the cave before John had a chance to flail away.

It was starting to dawn on John that this really was Lorne and Halling. Then he got confused, because he seemed to be lying back staring at the tree canopy and the sky, and he was a little dizzy; he realized abruptly that Halling had picked him up. _Okay, this is embarrassing,_ he thought woozily. "Hey," he croaked in protest.

Halling was saying, "We must hurry, he is very ill," and John heard the static of a headset and Lorne telling someone, "Get the jumper in here, now! Bring it right down over that pond and drop the ramp."

John faded out for a while, opening his eyes when they were suddenly in the jumper and Halling and Lorne were lowering him to a stretcher on the deck. John focused on the faces peering down at him and rasped out, "I'm not speaking to any of you people."

Things got hazy, but John was dimly aware of voices and faces and noise, the jumper bay, and then the infirmary.

With Beckett scanning him and poking him with needles, and the little nose-tube pouring oxygen into him, John's head started to clear. He was a little worried that this was a trick. Not that he could do anything about it if it was. Wary, he asked, "Where's Lucius?" His voice still sounded hoarse and weak.

Studying the scanner screen, Beckett gritted his teeth. "That bloody bastard is down in the brig, where he belongs."

John felt the tension drain out of his body. Nobody under the drug's influence could have faked that level of disgust and anger. Then Ronon suddenly loomed over him and said, "I'll bring you his head."

It was tempting. But it would be hard to write a report explaining how an unarmed detainee got his head severed accidentally. "That's a little much," John rasped out.

Ronon nodded understanding. "A hand? A finger?"

Okay, the finger was a possibility. He could probably come up with a reasonable explanation for that. John bit his lip, thinking it over. Ronon looked hopeful. But Beckett said in exasperation, "Ronon, lad, I told you to wait outside."

Then Teyla pushed forward, taking John's hand. "I am so sorry, John."

"It's okay," John said automatically, and then looked at her face, the anxiety and concern etched there, and it actually was okay.

Beckett began, "Teyla, love, I need to--"

"It is not okay," Teyla said, wincing. "We could not remember what we had done to you. He must have ordered us to forget." She took a sharp breath. "Once we realized what had happened, we were so afraid--"

That was freaking scary. Lucius could have ordered them to do anything to each other. John decided Operation Severed Head was a go. "Ronon--"

"No, no, no more visitors," Beckett said firmly, waving a chart to shoo them out. "Now go on, go."

There was some arguing, and John heard Rodney and Elizabeth somewhere nearby. But whatever Beckett had shot him up with was easing the pain in his lungs, making it easier to breathe, and John fell into an exhausted sleep.

Sometime later he opened gummy eyes to see Rodney sitting next to him. "We threw you out of the jumper while it was in midair?" Rodney blurted.

"Yeah." John coughed and cleared his throat. He was still in the main treatment area, surrounded by beeping monitors, but he was propped up on pillows, buried under several layers of warm blankets, and wearing scrubs and socks. He felt better, and wondered if it was too early to start asking for Jell-O. "It wasn't in upper atmosphere, but yeah."

Rodney looked miserable. "Sorry."

"'S'okay." John unburied a hand and rubbed his eyes. His memory was a little hazy. "Did I tell Ronon to cut Lucius' head off?"

"No, but it sounds like a fantastic idea." Rodney snorted, rapidly switching from miserable to disgruntled. Then he switched back. "There was blood, on your jacket. That we found in the jumper."

"Ronon's." John yawned. "I punched him in the face, he had a nosebleed."

Rodney slumped, relieved. "Well, it's not like he didn't ask for it."

John squinted at the copper-paneled ceiling. "I thought you were a hallucination."

Rodney sat up straight, appalled. "What, now?" He waved a frantic hand. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"No." John gave him a withering look. "Back on the planet."

"Oh, right, that." Rodney sat back again, shifted uncomfortably. "So... Are we okay?"

John settled back into the pillows. Jell-O later, more sleep now. "Yeah, we're okay."

And it was true.

  
**end**


End file.
